What Is Hojicha? Roasted Green Tea, and Why It Is Low in Caffeine

Hojicha is Japanese green tea roasted at high temperature until the leaf turns reddish-brown. Ground fine it becomes hojicha powder, whisked the way matcha is.

It was first made in Kyoto in the 1920s, reportedly to use up stems and older leaf that would not sell as sencha.

The roast changes the tea so completely that most people do not recognise it as green tea at all, and almost everything else on this page follows from what those few minutes of heat remove.

Hojicha at a glance

What it is

Japanese green tea roasted until the leaf turns reddish-brown

Roast

Around 200 C in a drum or over charcoal, for a few minutes

Water

90 to 100 C, effectively boiling

Steep

30 seconds to 1 minute

Leaf

3 g per 200 ml, and it is bulky so this looks like a lot

Caffeine

Commonly cited around 7 to 10 mg per cup, the lowest of the true teas

Keeps

A year or more sealed, which is exceptional for a Japanese tea

What the roaster takes out, caffeine included

Around 200 C for a few minutes, in a rotating drum or over charcoal, and four separate things happen to the leaf at once.

What the roast changes

Chlorophyll

Breaks down, so the leaf turns from green to brown

Catechins

Largely destroyed, which removes almost all the astringency

Caffeine

Substantially driven off, since it sublimes at roasting temperatures

Aroma

Pyrazines form, giving the toasted, nutty, caramel character

Amino acids

React with sugars, deepening the sweetness

Roasting removes almost everything people find difficult about green tea. The bitterness, the astringency and the grassiness all leave together, which is why hojicha is the green tea that people who dislike green tea tend to like.

Caffeine goes for a straightforwardly physical reason. It sublimes at around 178 C, well below the temperature inside the drum, so a meaningful proportion of it simply leaves the leaf as vapour during the roast.

That is why hojicha is poured in the evening across Japan and served to children alongside barley tea rather than the sencha the adults drank at lunch. It is the one tea on this site where the processing, rather than the dose or the steep, does most of the work on the number.

The exception is the powdered form, where nothing is left behind in a strainer, and hojicha caffeine sets the two side by side.

Where the green tea rules stop applying

Almost every instruction written for Japanese tea assumes a leaf that will turn bitter if you mistreat it, and none of that applies once the catechins have been burned away.

Starting point

Water

90 to 100 C, effectively boiling

Steep

30 seconds to 1 minute

Leaf

3 g per 200 ml, more than for sencha

Second steep

Yes, and often as good as the first

Boiling water is correct rather than merely tolerated. There are almost no catechins left to turn harsh, so the temperature caution that governs green tea bitterness is simply irrelevant, and cooler water only produces a weaker cup of the same thing.

The leaf is light and bulky, so 3 g looks like a large amount in the pot. Under-dosing is the commonest mistake with this tea and it produces something closely resembling weak toast water.

Time is forgiving in both directions. A minute longer deepens the roast notes rather than souring them, and this is one of the few teas that can sit in a pot at the table without punishing the last person to be poured a cup, which making hojicha treats as the whole point of the style.

Stems, leaf, and what actually goes into the roaster

What went into the drum changes the result more than the roast level does.

Stem-based hojicha is worth going out of the way for. Stems carry more of the sweet amino acids and fewer of the astringent compounds than leaf does, so a kuki hojicha comes out noticeably rounder and lighter than a leaf one roasted the same way.

The rarest version inverts the origin story completely. Karigane hojicha is made by roasting gyokuro stems, which means taking the most expensive shaded leaf in Japan and applying the process invented for the cheapest.

Nobody labels the roast level in a way that transfers between producers, so the base is the only part of the description that reliably predicts the cup. A dark roast from one maker is a medium from another.

What hojicha tastes like, hot and half-cooled

Toasted grain, caramel and roasted nuts, with a light woody edge behind them.

There is almost no astringency and very little bitterness unless the roast was pushed hard, and the liquor comes out reddish-amber rather than green, which catches people expecting something that looks like a green tea. Its body is light despite that dark colour, so the drink is less filling than it appears.

Temperature moves it further than it moves most teas. Very hot and straight from the pot, the roast notes are at their most aromatic and the drink reads closest to coffee, which is how it is served after a meal in Japan.

Left for a few minutes to reach ordinary drinking heat, the sweetness comes forward and the smoke recedes. Most people prefer it there without realising that waiting was the variable, and how hojicha tastes works through the same arc in more detail.

What it does not do at any temperature is turn bitter, which is why it tolerates standing in a way sencha never does. It takes milk unusually well for a green tea too, precisely because the catechins that would clash with it are gone.

Kyoto in the 1920s, and where it is made now

The origin is unusually well documented for a tea, and it explains what the style was for.

A Kyoto merchant in the 1920s, holding stems, older leaf and lower grades that would not move as sencha, put them over heat. The result sold, and the style spread quickly through Japan during a period when good tea was expensive and waste was not an option.

That history is why hojicha stays cheap relative to other Japanese teas, and why it is traditionally built from bancha and kukicha, the later harvests and the stems, rather than from first-flush leaf.

Kyoto remains the traditional home and Uji hojicha carries a premium, largely because the leaf underneath was better before anybody roasted it. Premium hojicha inverts the founding story, since roasting a good sencha produces something quite different from the everyday version and is priced accordingly.

Ishikawa has its own tradition in kaga bocha, made from roasted stems rather than leaf, which comes out lighter and noticeably sweeter. Most of the volume, meanwhile, comes from Shizuoka and Kagoshima using leaf and stems that would otherwise have been sold as bancha.

Powder, and the latte it was made for

Ground hojicha behaves like matcha rather than like leaf tea, and treating it as leaf is the source of most disappointment with it.

Because the whole leaf is consumed rather than infused, everything in it reaches the cup. That includes the caffeine the roast did not drive off, so the powder is not the low-caffeine drink the infusion is, whatever the packet says about hojicha in general.

Hojicha latte from powder

Powder

3 to 4 g, sifted

Hot water

40 ml, to make a paste

Milk

200 ml, steamed or hot

Sweetener

Optional. The roast already reads as sweet

Note

Whisk the paste smooth before the milk goes in

Milk is where the roast earns its keep. Roasting removed the catechins that would clash, which is why a hojicha latte works and a sencha latte mostly tastes of milk with something green and unhappy underneath it.

One large cup from leaf

Hojicha

6 g of leaf

Water

100 ml at boiling, steeped 45 seconds

Milk

180 ml, steamed to 60 to 65 C

Sweetener

Optional. The roast reads sweet already

Powder route

Whisk 4 g into 40 ml of hot water, then add the milk

Brewing at double strength is the step people skip. Milk flattens a normally brewed hojicha into something that tastes only faintly of tea, and the fix is concentration rather than more leaf in the same volume of water, with a milk frother doing the rest.

Roasting your own in a dry pan

Unlike almost any other tea processing, this one is genuinely practical at home with equipment you already own.

Spread bancha or a mid-grade sencha in a dry pan over medium heat and stir it constantly. The whole thing takes five to ten minutes, and the colour moves from green through olive to reddish-brown while the smell changes completely.

Let it cool completely before it goes anywhere near a container. Warm roasted leaf sweats inside a sealed tin and goes soft within a day, which undoes the entire point of the exercise.

Home-roasted hojicha is best drunk within a few weeks rather than kept. The roast drives off moisture and opens the leaf up, so it goes stale faster than a commercially roasted tea that was packed hot and sealed immediately, and hojicha problems is mostly a list of ways this goes wrong.

Why a roasted leaf keeps and a green one does not

Hojicha sits among the most stable teas on any shelf, and the roast is the entire reason.

The compounds that fade fastest in a green tea are precisely the ones the roast already destroyed. What is left behind is closer to a roasted coffee in its behaviour than to the leaf it started as, and it holds for a year or more without changing much.

• Keep it in an opaque airtight tin, away from the kettle and the hob.
• Buy in larger quantities than you would a sencha, since it will still be good.
• Do not refrigerate it. Condensation is the one thing it handles badly.
• Judge freshness by aroma. A flat, cardboard smell means it took up moisture.

Moisture is its single vulnerability. Roasted leaf is dry and porous and pulls water out of humid air readily, and damp hojicha goes flat rather than bitter, which makes the fault easy to miss until the cup arrives.

The general container rules in storing loose-leaf tea still apply, and storing hojicha covers where a roasted tea departs from them.

Cold and iced

Roasted flavours survive chilling far better than grassy ones do, which makes this the most reliable iced tea in the Japanese range.

Cold brewing takes four to six hours at 10 g per litre and gives something clean, sweet and entirely without astringency. It also holds two days in the fridge without going dull, which very few teas manage and no green tea does.

Brewing hot and pouring straight over ice works here as well, unlike with a delicate green tea, because there is no fragile aroma to lose in the shock of the cold. Brew at double strength and pour over a full glass rather than a half-empty one.

The route to avoid is a long hot steep followed by slow cooling on the counter. Hojicha will not turn bitter, but it does turn dull, which is the same fate every tea meets sitting warm for an hour with the leaf still in it.

The evening cup, and the food it sits beside

Hojicha holds a defined place at a Japanese table, and it is not the place green tea holds.

It is served after a meal rather than during one, and with food rather than as a palate cleanser between dishes. The roast gives it enough body to follow something rich, where a delicate leaf tea would simply be flattened by what came before it.

Sweets are the traditional pairing, and particularly anything carrying roasted or caramel notes of its own. Roasted soybean flour, chestnut and brown sugar all pick up on what the roast created, and chocolate is the pairing worth trying first.

The evening role is the practical one for most people outside Japan. It is the tea to make at nine o'clock when a sencha would be a poor idea and a herbal infusion would be too far from tea altogether, and it needs no adjustment to brewing temperature to fill that slot.

Where it works badly is anywhere its low astringency becomes a liability. It cannot cut through a very oily dish the way a roasted oolong does, because it has almost no tannin left to do the cutting with.

Against the other roasted drinks

Roasting is not unique to hojicha, and the small family it belongs to divides on one question, which is whether what went into the roaster was a tea leaf or a grain.

Roasting a tea leaf keeps some tea character while removing the grassiness. Roasting a grain produces a drink with no tea character whatsoever, which is why barley tea and hojicha taste more alike than their ingredients suggest and behave completely differently in a cup with milk.

The comparison with coffee is the one worth taking seriously, since it explains why hojicha travels so well outside Japan. It arrives with the roast notes a coffee drinker already recognises, without the acidity, the body or the caffeine, which makes it an easier first Japanese tea than anything green.